IFRA

WAN-IFRA: The Sun recently did a major ad campaign with Dulux paints. How did this campaign come about?

Abba Newbery: In the case of Dulux, it was a brief written by their media agency and was pitched to all media – so there was TV, outdoor, radio, newspapers – and they took the best idea and turned that into the campaign. The campaign ran for about half of this year (2009) – from spring to autumn.

The essence of their brief was the colour you paint your house or your office actually affects your mood. And if you can't sell your house in the current environment, not surprisingly actually, then you should think about painting it. Our view was that's actually not very interesting to our readers, but the opportunity to paint to make a difference is an interesting idea, and it’s more interesting to go out and paint community projects and doing good. The knock-on effect is that people will also do that at home. That's a more exciting concept, and that's what we did. We created the idea.

WAN-IFRA: How popular are these large-scale campaigns? What portion of the ad business do they represent?

Newbery: It's a growing market. I'm not saying it hasn't been effected by the recession, but it's still growing despite the recession, and I think if we didn't have the recession it would be growing even faster than it is currently, but it's still a business that's in growth.

I would say that for most people this is probably 5 to 10 percent of their business, and that figure has been growing over the past five years. It's only a five-year-old discipline really.

WAN-IFRA: In the case of these large campaigns, you have editorial working with advertising to a certain extent. This is something of a change from the traditional separation of editorial and advertising. How does this work?

Newbery: We have to protect our readers. We have high standards of editorial integrity, and those standards do not change when we do a commercial deal. We will only do these things if we believe them to be interesting to our readers. If they're not interesting to our readers, we'll turn down the money, because ultimately these things are the products, as much as any other article in the newspaper is a product. It's about striking that balance, finding and creating ideas that are interesting to our readers but are also going to make our advertisers successful businesses. So, it is tricky, but I think that church and state divide is still really important. Obviously, it puts quite a lot of pressure on us as a team to come up with ideas that are genuinely good and interesting, and then when we go and speak to editorial, if it is good and interesting there are no problems because they are like “Brilliant. Yeah, this is how it could work, etc. etc.” The only time when there are problems is when the idea is not good enough. So, the trick is learning when to say no.

WAN-IFRA: You also have campaigns that run across titles, is that correct?

Newbery: Yes, we did the Barclays local business campaign that ran in The Sun and also in The Times.

WAN-IFRA: What’s different about those kinds of campaigns? Are they a lot more difficult to organise?

Newbery: Yes, we have to completely change the way the campaign is done. Our editorial teams might write about the same story in The Sun and The Times, but their approach to the question of the editorial will be completely different. With The Sun and Barclays, it was all about us getting our readers to tell us who their favourite local tradesman was: “I really love my butcher,” or “My plumber around the corner is great.” And then asking our readers to vote for who their favorite local business hero was and why. In The Times it was all about what are the key challenges facing small businesses and what things should they be doing to help survive the recession? One was focussed on the business and one was focussed on the customers. Different logos, very different styles, but the same campaign.

The Barclays campaign ran for about three or four months. It kicked off in May (2009) and ran until September, because we needed to get all the nominations in, and judge the awards and then follow up with all the people who were going to be short-listed and then pick a winner and obviously go out and interview the winner, so it’s quite a long process.

WAN-IFRA: How does a campaign like this work?

Newbery: A project like this will get a dedicated campaign manager, plus we have the writing team from an editorial perspective. That writing team are all part of the title, or part of The Sun, they are not commercial editorial people. They were actually the business teams of the papers writing it. And we worked with Barclays, and they basically sifted through all of the responses. Then we had a judging panel that consisted of our business editor on The Sun, some representatives from Barclays and a famous entrepreneur in the U.K., they then came together for a day and went through the short-listed entries. The client was happy to go through all the different entries, but you do need to prepare to get 10-15-20,000 entries. We made it quite difficult for people to enter in order to keep the number of entries down. Not difficult as in difficult to qualify, but difficult in the sense that we said you had to write 300 words, and so it sort of suppresses the total response.

WAN-IFRA: Are the sales teams generally selling across titles? And are they also selling online along with everything else?

Newbery: Yes, everyone sells everything. We divide into a few ways, we have a specialised team, a creative solutions team, who do these kind of deals. They work across all titles, so they are not the same as the day-to-day advertising team. And then in that team, half of them are creative sales people and half of them are campaign managers, and you're either responsible for a particular agency, so Mediacom or Mindshare or something like that, or you're responsible for a particular category. We have a system where if it was a brief on Ford from Mindshare, you would have the car person and the agency person and working together.

This interview was conducted by Brian Veseling, WAN-IFRA's senior editor for Publishing, Editorial and General Management.